Legal Practitioners Act, 1879 and All India Bar Committee of 1951

Seventy-two years separate these two reforms, and yet they are trying to fix the same basic problem: too many categories of lawyer, too little control in the profession's own hands. The Legal Practitioners Act, 1879 tidied the paperwork. The All India Bar Committee of 1951 finally said, in plain terms, that tidying was not enough — the profession needed to be one thing, run by itself.

In two minutes

The Legal Practitioners Act, 1879 consolidated the law on pleaders, mukhtars and attorneys and extended rule-making power to High Courts not established under a royal charter, while the All India Bar Committee, formed in 1951 under Justice S. R. Das, recommended abolishing every distinction between classes of practitioner and creating an autonomous All India Bar Council and State Bar Councils — recommendations that became the Advocates Act, 1961.

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